International organizations, e-government and development

Following the diffusion of e-government in the technologically advanced high income countries, international organizazions, notably UN, OECD, World Bank, have promoted the implementation of e-government practices in developing countries as priority means to further good governance, democracy and development. ICTs can, indeed, be very useful in order to make public administration more transparent, accountable and participated or in connecting and networking faraway places, especially where transports and phisical infrastructures are lacking or insufficient. However, a decade later, the few researches conducted in the field show that the overwhelming majority of e-government projects in developing countries end up in total or partial failure. The best practices identified in high income countries prove difficult to be reproduced in settings that are very different in terms of organizational traditions and development. Despite the recognition of the need to take into account local specificities and to get the locals involved in the process, e-government in developing countries still appears essentially as a mere transfer operated by donor countries' firms with western technologies. Moreover, as these technologies are mostly proprietary, they prevent institutions and users from developing countries to modify and adapt the tools to their particular needs and lock them in a position of permanent technological dependency For what concerns the cost efficiency of e-government projects, it must be said that the advantages observed in developed countries, where the cost of hardware and software is more than compensated for by the savings in terms of costly human labor, are less likely to be obtained in developing countries, where the cost of labor is a small fraction of that in developing countries and the cost of ICTs is proportionally much higher. The claim that e-government diffusion in developing countries can improve the prospects for democracy is based on a normative assumption supported by little evidence. The causality chain between e-government, good governance, and democracy (with the frequent addition of economic growth as a further stage), if at all plausible, looking at history should be probably read the other way around. In fact, some scholars consider the contribution of e-government to overall development irrelevant, if not negative, in the measure in which it diverts funds from higher priorities.